Creating professional-looking home movies is a difficult task. Existing video editing systems are capable of creating aesthetically pleasing, professional-looking videos. These systems, however, are either too complex and difficult for users to easily learn and use in a time efficient manner, or too automated. With some existing systems, users are required to manually assemble a variety of different elements including video clips, audio clips, titles, effects, narration and background music. Combining these elements into a professional-looking home movie requires advanced skills and a significant time investment.
In addition, editing techniques vary from user to user. For example, a user who records a child's soccer game wants to create a highlight video that is brief and only focuses on key events such as defensive plays and goals. In this scenario, the user chooses video clips that are of high quality, contain a key event, and are focused on a particular child. The user may delete ground shot scenes, blurry scenes, and out of focus scenes. Since the video is a highlights video, the user shortens most of the video clips.
Another user, however, may edit a video of the same soccer game by creating a home movie that represents the entire game. In this case, the user only removes portions of video clips that are extremely poor in quality (e.g., very dark shots, shots of the ground, or blurry shots). The user in this scenario performs very little editing since the focus is to capture the entire event. Key events may be highlighted by applying a video effect to the video clip where a player makes a goal.
Each of the above users may make similar decisions when editing other videos. For example, the users are likely to use the same style when editing subsequent videos of soccer games. Unfortunately, the users must repeat the entire video editing process even though the same style and technique will be used again. Such repetition is time consuming, burdensome, and discouraging.
Other existing systems are completely automated. Features of such existing systems allow the user to automatically create a complete movie with little or no user interaction. Such existing systems have predefined styles, but these styles are limited and often do not meet the needs of the individual user. For example, users may have different goals and objects when creating a home movie. The built-in templates and predefined styles in existing systems confine the user to a particular style and do not provide the level of customization and flexibility needed to enable the user to create a professional-looking video that focuses on user-specific portions of interest.
Some existing video editing systems allow the user to replace sections of a video timeline or storyboard with different video clips. For example, stock footage, effects, and transitions may be preserved from one project to another, but the user must still manually choose what clips to include and edit the chosen clips. This approach results in videos that are very rigid and uniform.